In case anyone is wondering, I'm a 30-something foreign guy slaving away as a mid-management salaryman in the corporate world of Japan. This blog will relate wonderous tales of my adventures in work and general life in Tokyo as I try to balance work and family.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Breaking and entering - good 'ol regular racism

Today I stood and chatted a bit by the coffee machine in the kithcen space with "Grandpa", one of the older semi-retired guys in the office. He's basically the nicest man I know, wouldn't hurt a fly and always has something nice to say about anyone, and we're very friendly as I have known him for many years now.

So as we stood there chatting, I mentioned that we had a burglary incident in one of the houses in our little area and the conversation went something like this:

Salaryman: (concerned) so they rummaged through everything, apparently, looking for money but didn't steal anything but smashed some stuff in their house

Grandpa: (looks sad) Yes, there's too many foreigners here now in Japan, this would never happened 20 years ago...

Salaryman: (jokingly defensive) Well, this time it wasn't me! (laughing)

Grandpa: (realizing who he's talking to) Oh, of course not, no, you would never do something... (interrupted)

Salaryman: (starting to head off with my cup of coffee) well, you can never be too careful nowadays, can you?

Nothing like a dose of old school ignorant racism, but Grandpa is such a sweet old man that I couldn't really bother to work myself up over it. If anything, it's a bit of fresh air after all the positive racism that the Japanese has been exposed to lately!

Chris - Yeah, Ishihara is kinda beyond racism and at least halfway out into insanity. I think it's just because he's an old geezer that he gets away with saying some of the stuff that he does. It really gives the old school '70s and '80s government sanctioned racism vibes! I bet he's buddies with former PM Mori!

RMilner - Unfortunately not, but maybe I can train her for the future

Fernando and BiJ - Another great case are those instances where they try to get you on their side by switching towards the Chinese or Koreans as the bad foreigners

When Japanese say foreigners they are talking about Chinese and Koreans mostly because the organized crime groups from China and Korea has come To be quite a problem. They are even rivaling Japanese organized crime.

Who's this guy?

Well, the general content is in the blog, but if you are suffering from a short attention span, In case anyone is wondering, I'm a 30-something foreign guy slaving away as a mid-management salaryman in the corporate world of Japan. This blog will relate wonderous tales of my adventures in work and general life in Tokyo as I try to balance work and family.
Since some of the craziness from work has started to creep into my private life some interesting tidbits from that area will also occasionally be brought up.